{"id":59489,"date":"2018-01-16T21:58:24","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T21:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bnreport.com\/black-death-spread-by-humans-not-rats-2\/"},"modified":"2018-01-16T21:58:28","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T21:58:28","slug":"black-death-spread-by-humans-not-rats-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bnreport.com\/en\/black-death-spread-by-humans-not-rats-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Death ‘spread by humans not rats’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rats were not to blame for the spread of plague during the Black Death, according to a study. <\/p>\n

The rodents and their fleas were thought to have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe.<\/p>\n

But a team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice".<\/p>\n

The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science<\/a>, uses records of its pattern and scale. <\/p>\n

The Black Death claimed an estimated 25 million lives, more than a third of Europe's population, between 1347 and 1351.<\/p>\n

"We have good mortality data from outbreaks in nine cities in Europe," Prof Nils Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, told BBC News. <\/p>\n

"So we could construct models of the disease dynamics [there]."<\/p>\n

He and his colleagues then simulated disease outbreaks in each of these cities, creating three models where the disease was spread by:<\/p>\n